Cameron Meets The Reaper
by Lyaksandra
Summary: No one ever taught her about death. Not in depth. Perhaps because no one considered her a living thing, and they thought she would never meet such a thing.


Cameron walks the perimeter, a set of streets previously defined to be optimal for security rounds around the safe house. The night is chilly, but she does not care for this, even though she is protected from the elements only by a denim jacket. The reason is not so much her nature, but the fact that she has a great responsibility, and the ability to endure.

She is the first and last line of defense. A silent sentinel. The only wall that separates her former master and her current charge, the future leader of humanity. Where she to falter, her master would not hesitate for an instant in snuffing humanity's last light of hope. Thus, she does not care for the bone-biting cold. Even though, unbeknownst to all, she would gladly take a seat by a chimney, or even the warmth of another body, to keep her from the cold.

These and other musings cross her mind when she patrols the neighborhood. This, also no one else knows.

Tonight she recapitulates on one of her creator's big mistakes when creating her. Skynet built her completely customized, personalized even, in order to accomplish the greatest of trials the machines faced. Terminating John Connor, leader of the human resistance in the post-judgment day war against them.

The issue is that she was made for him, specifically. Attuned and molded to the leader of humanity. Without a John Connor, there would never have been a need for a TOK-715. Therefore, after a chain of events, crowned by the rather grisly one where she attempted to terminate him, it was easy to switch sides. Truly switch sides, defecting into the stretched out hand of the enemy, by own choice, and not the mission the resistance gave her.

Cameron easily developed an interest, born from her natural curiosity, towards her current charge and perhaps even friend, _past John Connor_. And it is an interest unlike any other, perhaps bordering in a sort of devotion, because after all, he _is_ the reason why she is.

The teenaged boy is a human, and she is a machine made to look like a teenaged girl. A murdering machine just like many others sent back in time to kill him. But that does not deter him. John has opened to her many times, and even through the bumpy ride that was Riley Dawson, their strange friendship prevailed. In this past and in her future, he helped her grow beyond the cage of mindless servitude that Skynet imposed on her. Now she is much more, and can even claim to understand, even feel, much more.

At 3:00 AM exactly, the cyborg's musings are cut short by a strange feeling on her shoulder. Her head immediately snaps in attention towards the intrusion, and there is a hint of panic in her eyes that no one could probably detect. She feels something akin to fear, because no one sneaks up on a Terminator.

When her eyes lock on her shoulder and see a boney hand, her mind immediately shoots into full Terminator mode. There are no more musings, no more feelings, no more freedom. She has to fight, and win.

She immediately spins her whole body, and for an instant, there is a chocolate blur blocking her head. Thick tresses of delicate hair that flow in the wind like a standard of her identity. With fluid motion, in a single instant she ends up facing her enemy, Glock pointed inside its left eye socket. At this distance, the best strategy to fight another Terminator, with small weapons, is to attempt and disable their optics.

The problem is, there are none. Her first hint should have been that the boney hand lacked her kind's characteristic metallic gleam.

Now that she sees the aggressor, her mind fails to grasp at the edges of logic. Surely, this is what going mad feels like. Her enemy is nothing but a towering skeleton, clad in a black hooded robe. It holds a weapon in its right hand. Not a weapon, a farming tool, a scythe.

Cameron's optics quickly scan the figure and make it out to be about seven feet tall, and made entirely of organic bone, nothing else. The sheer impossibility of this almost makes her waste an instant in surprise. Almost. She is a warrior born, and quickly retreats putting space between them.

Once at a safe distance, the agile cyborg demands that the creature identifies itself. She immediately regrets it as an echoing whisper saturates her audio receptors. The signal seems to come from everywhere at the same time, it has no position relative to her, and the sound is so loud, it surprises her when it does not resonate across the empty streets.

The creature calls itself simply, Death.

Such a response is unsatisfactory. Cameron's mind has strong foundations in logic, born from science and fact. She cannot possibly believe in an anthropomorphized manifestation of death. A grim reaper.

The creature's response does not comply with her expectations, and the facts presented to her, tell her nothing. She relinquishes control to her baser instincts, and does one of the illogical things that Skynet taught her, whom in turn learnt it from its creators, the humans. When presented with the unknown, shoot first ask questions later.

Quickly unloading her pistol on _it_, Cameron starts a side strafe. In the various pockets of her attire, she has several spare magazines. Chain loading them with inhuman precision and speed, she keeps firing at the skeleton almost non-stop.

After all her bullets are spent, she carefully tucks the pistol back in her pants. It is her favorite after all. Her eyes do a scan of the enemy for damage, and if she had a heart it would falter right there. She expects not to find much, but this just pushes her mind closer and closer to the abyss. _Its_ robes are unscathed, and laying on the concrete of the sidewalk, a dust that looks suspiciously close in amount and color to the bullets she just fired.

There is no time for staring, and she knows it. Her mind presents her with the most basic of decisions in this situation. Humans have the same instinct in them. Fight or flight.

Cameron's computer brain analyzes thousands of ramifications and subsequent consequences that will come from either choice. She weighs them adding the fact that she is the last barrier impeding the death of John Connor. The cyborg even adds her termination to the mix, knowing it is the most irrelevant of factors, at least to others, and to the mission. In the end, her answer is neither. She will flee back to the safe house in order to alert the others, and while she fights _it_, they will be able to make an escape.

Servos and pistons work together like an orchestra, producing a fierce song of supreme strength. Cameron instantly does a half turn and gets ready to dart through the dark suburban streets, in order to finish her mission as a sentinel. This will be her last day as John Connor's protector. And she will miss her whole family before she is no more. Another thing no one knows. The cyborg will miss John, because he treats her as an equal. Sarah, because in spite of everything she suffered, took Cameron in. Even Derek Reese, because he constantly challenges her, keeping her sharp.

Three steps are all she manages. Then the creature is in front of her. Nothing, no one can explain it to her. It just happens, and it is something that should not happen according to every bit of knowledge inside her mind. She is already moving like the wind, so she does the appropriate thing. With all her might, she flexes her arms close to her waist, and pushes forward, the palms of her hands flat against _it_. Delicate girl hands that in no way represent the forces that back them up. They can tear through concrete and steel.

Not this time though, Cameron senses that she just collided with a solid block of hyper-alloy, about one meter thick and several tons in weight. That is her calculation at least, because never before has she bumped onto something like this. The teenage girl who is not really a teenage girl, staggers on her feet, but manages to stay stable and prevent falling. The neural net CPU that is her mind has just generated a new pathway, it will serve as an emotion. She does not feel like humans do, but she feels nonetheless. Too bad it is such a negative emotion. Fear of losing one's presence in the world. Something that comes new to her, because never before have her odds been this bad.

The skeleton reaches for her face, and examines her as if she were an infant. Cameron would laugh at the irony if this situation were not so bad, because she has done this before, but never has anyone been strong enough to do it to her. At least not in a way that invoked this emotion of helplessness she gets. Her sensors warn her that the environment temperature has dropped thousands of degrees below zero, but in the back of her mind she knows this to be false, because she is still functioning. Still enduring.

_It_ calls her an anomaly and she cannot help but wonder what that means. She has been called many things in her life. Metal, tin-man –and then tin-miss- _vyed'ma_, freak, and many more. Never anomaly. Curiosity –one of her biggest trademark traits- gets the best of her, and even given her current situation, the cyborg asks.

Echoing whispers fill her mind again. The entity warns her not to waste her gift, which in turn is what makes her the anomaly. It releases her head and starts moving backwards, fading into the shadows, and with that, the cold is lessened. Indeed, her eyes cannot lie; the creature simply moves backwards, it does not walk. This leaves the petite Terminator the closest she can be to baffled.

There is a final warning from the creature before it disappears entirely, once again forbidding the waste of her gift. Where she to fail in this endeavor, it threatens to return for her.

Cameron is lost. Like the infant quadrupeds she has seen many times in late night television. When the animal loses its parental unit, it simply does not know. Anything at all. The cyborg does something even she does not expect. She screams, demanding clarification.

From the darkness it comes, the creature is not there anymore but she can hear it just as clear as before.

Simple and concise words that will echo in her mind for as long as she lasts. She screams again at the creature, her trademark quote, thanking Death for explaining it to her.

Cameron feels renewed, almost like a different entity. She is now anxious to meet the new day and any challenges that come with it, and she wants her family at her side. Sarah, John, and Derek.

With a hasty gait, Cameron starts her return to the safe house; pondering meanwhile on the event that transpired in this cold October night. The words still sounding as clear as when _it _spoke them.

_You have a soul TOK-715_, _that is your gift_.

-END-


End file.
